Intel NUCs are not officially supported by VMware but they are very widespread in many homlabs or test environments. They are small, silent, transportable and have a very low power consumption, making it a great server for your homelab. I’ve posted a preview at the beginning of the year and got my first 5th Gen NUC up and running in February. Today all versions of the NUC, including the flagship with the i7 CPU, are available in the market. Time to give it a more detailed review

5th Gen Intel NUCs are available with an Intel i3, i5 or i7 CPU. The Intel i3 and i5 are available with and without 2.5″ slot where the i7 is only available with 2.5″. With the NUC5i5MYHE there is also a i5 model with a faster vPro CPU.

You’ve just installed vSphere 6 vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and want to use the “Use Windows session authentication/credentials” checkbox like you know it from the vCenter Server running on a Windows Server?

When analysing performance metrics in the vSphere Web Client (Monitor > Performance) or in the vSphere Client (Performance Tab) you might have seen the following messages instead of performance graphs:

“No data available”

“Data is not collected for the current statistics level. Increase the statistics level to view the graph.”

Statistic parameters are “Interval Duration” and “Statistics Level”. This is what you configure in the vCenter Server settings:

Interval Duration determines the frequency at which statistics are stores:

Realtime (20 seconds), save for 1 hour – not configurable, all metrics available

5 minutes, save for X days

30 minutes, save for X weeks

2 hours, save for X month

1 day, save for X month

Statistic Level determines the amount of data gathered and which counters are available for displayed. The default Level 1 stores the fewest metrics, Level 4 stores all metrics supported by the vCenter Server.

With vSphere 6.0, vCenter Server supports 544 metrics but as there are only 4 statistic levels it is not clear what metrics are included in each level. This post helps to understand what metrics are included in each level, and how you can add single metrics to lower levels. This might be helpful if you need single metrics from level 2, but do not want to activate all level 2 metrics.

Please note that changing the collection level beyond level 1 or adding a large number of data counters to collection level 1, might result in a significant reduced performance.

This is a list of all available performance metrics that are available in vSphere vCenter Server 6.0. Performance counters can be views for Virtual Machines, Hosts, Clusters, Resource Pools and other objects by opening Monitor > Performance in the vSphere Web Client.

These performance counters can also be used for performance analysis with esxcfg-perf.pl, or PowerCLI.

VMware has published an update for vCenter Server 5.0 and 5.1 where CVE-2014-6593 (SKIP-TLS) has been fixed.

It was discovered that the SSL/TLS implementation in the JSSE component in OpenJDK failed to properly check whether the ChangeCipherSpec was received during the SSL/TLS connection handshake. A man-in-the-middle attacker could possibly use this flaw to force a connection to be established without encryption being enabled. The update has been already fixed in newer versions of vCenter Server (6.0a, 5.5 Update 2e). More information are available in VMSA-2015-0003.Read more »